"In stories as haunting as anything the Grimm brothers could have come up with, Link gooses the mundane with meaning and enchantment borrowed from myth, urban legend and genre fiction.

Here are superheroes who, like minor characters from reality shows, attend conferences at the same hotels as dentists and hold auditions for sidekicks. Here, a Ouija board can tell you as much about your future as your guidance counselor. In “Two Houses,” six astronauts wake from suspended animation to while away the time telling ghost stories, although they may be ghosts themselves. . . . In a Link story, someone is always trying to escape and someone is always vanishing without a trace. Lovers are forever being stolen away like changelings, and when someone tells you he’ll never leave you, you should be very afraid.

Exquisite, cruelly wise and the opposite of reassuring, these stories linger like dreams and will leave readers looking over their shoulders for their own ghosts."
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

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“These tales marshall fantastical elements, but their focus is on the stuff of life.”
— Editor’s Choice, New York Times Book Review

“Link’s stories are never fully realist, but they are always beautifully written. “The Summer People” begins with the exquisite line “Fran’s daddy woke her up wielding a mister.” In this and many other ­places the experience of reading Link is a lot more like reading Raymond Carver than it should be, given that her characters do things like throw parties on spaceships and get off with literal toy boys. Then again, now that we are far enough into the 21st century that celebrities have their names down for space trips, and most people have a phone capable of reminding them to pick up their dry cleaning when they leave the house, maybe it’s just as normal for a Kelly Link story to contain a pocket universe or a tent that has a cottage on the inside as it was for Carver to describe a broken fridge or a cathedral.”
— Scarlett Thomas, New York Times Book Review

“Kelly Link is best known for her outstanding young adult fiction (Pretty Monsters, for instance), but in Get in Trouble: Stories, her first book for adults in a decade, she brings the fantastical and odd into clear focus. Oh, hell, she just plain brings it. There’s a convention of superheroes where a runaway from Iowa plans to meet a guy from online; a pair of drunks at an abandoned theme park that provides a decaying Oz backdrop, yellow brick road and all; and a woman married to an alien, though her real problem is sleeping sickness. Not all the stories have supernatural connections, but there’s a certain fascination with the unusual that hits close to the original meaning of the word “awesome,” in that the oddness — or even the normalcy — of the situation is secondary to the emotional and psychological reality of life. Certainly one of the best books of the winter, Get in Trouble will make short work of long nights.
— Colorado Springs Independent

“The nine pieces in Link’s new collection feel distinct from any set standard or storytelling tradition. These stories are odd and discomfiting, full of jagged edges and blind corners.”
— The Globe and Mail

“In Get in Trouble, it’s pretty incredible to find such an accessible passageway to fairy world, where interstellar hauntings are as frightening and eldritch as otherworldly magpies who reign over dappled mountains. Kelly Link is a master guide who is only too willing to scare, thrill, and intrigue with a well-turned walk in those woods.”
— Portland Mercury

“Still, only the marvelous contents of these books can demonstrate Link’s mastery and self-confidence as an author: She believes in her stories, no matter how off the wall they might seem, and she makes her readers believe in them, too.”
— Michael Dirda, Washington Post

“With a delicately balanced mix of the utterly mundane and the bewitchingly fantastical, each of the nine stories offers something at once relatable and slightly off-kilter to chew on.”
— Alexis Burling, The Oregonian

“Link’s writing is characterized by both a high literary value and a deep human sentiment…. At the same time, no matter how far-ranging her imagination, how beautiful her language, Link keeps the characters firmly at the focal point of these stories, tales of change and understanding, of loss and growth, of fundamental human truths that will resonate with familiarity for every reader, no matter how weird things get.”
— Robert J Wiersema, The Toronto Star

“There were times, reading this book, that I audibly went “Mmmm.” How can you not, when confronted with rhythmic, lulling writing, traces of supernatural energy, and dark, writhing plot points? Link’s first book in 10 years requires a sense of adventure and, at times, a strong stomach—but the weirder it gets, the more satisfying it feels.
— Megan Angelo, Glamour

“The best of her stories linger after they end, casting shadows and opening doors to strange new worlds.”
— Margaret Quamme, Columbus Dispatch

“Link tiptoes up behind these characters and gives them a push; get in trouble, she seems to say, show us what you can do.” — Shelf Awareness

“The stories in Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble soar and zing like LSD-tipped arrows shot into the farthest reaches of the imagination.”
— Elissa Schappel, Vanity Fair

Kelly has a huge “working” playlist (and also: huge headphones) and she wrote about part of it for David Gutowski’s Largehearted Boy Book Notes series:

I wrote the nine stories in Get in Trouble over not quite a decade. I wrote them, usually, with headphones on; usually listening to to the same songs over and over again. When no one else is around I sing out loud — embarrassingly, terribly, out of tune — mangling lyrics and harmonies. Does anyone else do this? Type out your own sentences while singing someone else’s lyrics? Anyway. I need to be distracted from the work that I’m doing while I’m doing it.

The songs below are culled from the very much larger playlist that I listen to when I work. There are significantly more than nine songs on it, but I couldn’t whittle it down any further. They’re the songs that I wore out the hardest while writing these stories. I’ve ordered them according to how long they’ve been stuck on that playlist, and for each story I’ve attached the song (or songs) that seemed to have particular resonances with it, and for me. [read on]